The Turgid Main and Its Monstrosities
Daniel Rabuzzi
Who dreaded no degree of death, but, with dry eyes,
Surveyed the turgid main and its monstrosities—
And rendered futile so, the prudent Power’s decree
Of separate earth and disassociating sea;
Since, how is it observed, if impious vessels leap
Across, and tempt a thing they should not touch—the deep?
Robert Browning, Fifine at the Fair, LXXXII lines 36-41 (1872); itself Browning's paraphrase of Horace, Odes, I.3.
Eight weeks out from the finisterre, smash along, sailors,
chant and heave,
halfway to the doubtful islands ere we can be relieved.
Rooster-headed fish pursue us, and glassy wrassid reeves,
and reaving sharks,
with teeth that scrape our hull in hunger, and weedy boils
up the grinners, the lizardfish, the giant nosebone cuttlefish.
Hoy now, a tall and curvespine tower is spied ten miles away,
upthrown in the untracked waters of these empty seas,
a crooked finger beckoning, a ring it wears, that is
a single window high up, within the frame a candle
the size of a monstrous pine-tree were it located on fast and footed land,
instead of perched atop a plinth of black and rusty coral,
a candle lighted so we can see its pallid beam across the taunting swells.
No man can resist the cold unflickering flame,
alluring, shushing the sound of the waves to silence,
weaving visions in our minds of home and hearth and love unsleeved,
while a current grips our ship and pulls us in and so we
witless smiling come to the unplanned end of our voyage,
cheered by green-eyed ribbonfish and the haughty flying cheirothrix,
ushers into the lonely tower, with salt-edged invitations
and promises bubbled by spiderfish, hurrah'ed by frothy grins of jelly
stingers,
all hail, lads and ladies, the rulers of the deeps.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi
Daniel A. Rabuzzi (www.danielarabuzzi.com) has been published in, among others, Crab Creek Review, Four Tulips, Harvard Review, New Letters, Chicago Review of Books, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. Pushcart nominee. Poetry chapbooks published by Moonstone Arts Center (2025) and Finishing Line Press (2026). He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills (www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com).